Thoughts on Money

Security is fundamentally about being able to hold and stay in the tension of uncertainty without compulsively resolving it or dispelling it.

Owning your right to feel good about money can help you make it happen. This isn’t law of attraction, raising your vibrations or whatever. It doesn’t actually get you more money by any means. It’s about getting creative to use the system against itself and claim the good money vibes you have every right to experience.

I have great control of my money when I am earning it. I have zero control of my money when I am not.

But consumption smoothing pays homage to an existential reality: Life itself is the ultimate scarce asset. The future is unknowable, and religiously maintaining a double-digit savings rate through the worst squalls of life is not of the utmost importance.

Neither he nor the others feel that the hunched shoulders and housing insecurity of their youth were good for their art. The “La Bohème” portrait of impoverished painters and poets was after all a description, not a prescription. “And at least they could afford the garret,” Jacobs-Jenkins says. “In New York, forget it.”

We need to remember that the market is not the economy, and the economy is not the market. And the economy makes me very worried about food banks. Children are hungry, people are hungry. And when kids can’t eat they can’t pay attention in school, and if they can’t pay attention in school they can’t be good students; they can’t move forward in the... See more

Risk isn’t a measure of negative consequences. It’s a measure of uncertainty. And the issue with minimizing risk is that while we protect our downside, we prevent ourselves from achieving any sort of meaningful upside. In this way, risk minimization isn’t an insurance policy as much as it is a collar, and the cost of protecting our downside is the... See more